BY GAIL GRIFFIN
1959
My mother saw a great blue heron on the way home from the grocery store. Unremarkable on the face of it; Ardea herodias is adaptable enough to live wherever it can find shores and wetlands, Atlantic to Pacific, from as far north as Prince William Sound in Alaska to the Galapagos. So it was not a miracle to see one on the outskirts of Franklin, Michigan, in the 1950’s. That didn’t keep it from seeming singular.
Franklin was one of the northern suburbs of Detroit born of the first wave of white flight from the city in the early 50’s. They were so new that they contained vacancy: empty lots, and fields that didn’t yet qualify as lots but for children did qualify as Wilderness, full of cattails and poison ivy and unnamable dry stalks that left you covered in burrs. The real wildness in the vicinity lay in us. We took our adventure where we could find it, and we needed all that we could find, for the burgeoning culture of the burbs had as its aim the removal of chaos, the chastening of chance, the settling of the frontier. Our lives were regular, quiet, supervised, enormously privileged and highly predictable. In other words, safe. We knew some fundamental truths: the main course at dinner would come from a limited list of known entrees; we would take piano and dancing; we would be Brownies and then Girl Scouts; for sixth grade we would get either Mrs. Koch or Mr. Polkernowski (aka Mr. Poke, so they rhymed). There were four channels to choose from: 2, 4, 7, and also 9, from across the river in Canada. Fathers drove off to “ the office” in the morning and returned just prior to dinner. Anybody’s mother could be relied on to doctor scrapes, answer questions, hear our news, or drive us home, if she wasn’t at the grocery store.
The safety of this disciplined world allowed us to run remarkably free. In summer, we flew out the door in the morning, not to be seen again until dinner. We made the rounds of the neighborhood on foot and bike. But only as far as Fourteen Mile Road, Franklin’s northern boundary, which we never thought to cross. Maybe we were under direct orders, or maybe we simply knew better than to leave the known world behind. There be dragons, in the form of unfamiliar dogs and unknown teenagers.
On the other side of one stretch of Fourteen Mile lay wide acres of dark, dense marsh. This is where, one day, driving home from Kroger’s, my mother spotted the heron. She stopped the car, waited, and watched until it flew off. She came home transported. “A heron! A Great Blue Heron!” What happened then was that we mocked her, as we often mocked her enthusiasm, probably encouraged by my father, assisted in turn by an entire culture that consistently presented female enthusiasm as ridiculous.
Why does that afternoon stick in the mud of memory? I keep seeing her, seized by a vision in the middle of her housewifely day, in the middle of her highly prescribed life, in the middle of a marriage that had curdled years ago to a man deeply invested in his personal patriarchy. Smack in the middle of the century, in the middle of the suburbs of Middle America, an epiphany of sorts. She sits and watches as the tall, thin creature bides its time, waiting for a stray frog, then suddenly unfolds its six-foot wingspan and awkwardly, beautifully flaps the earth away.
1967
Maybe an unremarkable childhood landscape, like a hostile one, attunes you to the remarkable, the irruption of the mythic. I know that I felt it when, at the end of my seventeenth summer, my plane was descending into Portland, Oregon, and I saw through the left window the sharp peak of Mt. Hood—fierce, gleaming, alarmingly close. For the remainder of my visit with my brother and his young family, I kept seeking it on the eastern skyline, presiding like some transcendent, mysterious power.
The Pacific Northwest offered a landscape that spoke a new language. The titanic powers of mountains and ocean in close proximity; the giant firs serrating the sky; the Willamette yielding to the broad, serene Columbia – the vistas were rugged and lyrical at once. I usually visited in summer, so I never saw the legendary drizzle of the other eight months; only the dense greens and florid blooms it generated. I smelled some newness in the air, some openness that encouraged a deep breath. I felt some residue of what the white pioneers might have felt a century earlier, reaching the end of the trail: that life could be reimagined here, as far as you could get from the past.
My brother and his wife lived with their two small children in a house in the West Hills that looked out across the city toward the mountain. They seemed perfect: married, happy, with beautiful children and interesting friends and wonderful places to go and a view of that mountain from the upper story. I felt like an anomaly, as usual. I did a passable impression of a happy teenager to cover a fundamental discomfort, loneliness, and alienation. In my brother’s house I was a visitor in a world that I couldn’t imagine myself inhabiting.
1792
Admiral George Vancouver, at 35, was enjoying his first command as he crossed the
Pacific and turned left, sailing up the western coast of North America. The name of his ship, HMS Discovery, reflected his mission and the vision of his age. His Majesty King George III might have lost the American colonies and his sanity, but the Empire itself was a going concern. Vancouver had two directives: to accept from the Spanish commander possession of Nootka Sound, to the west of the great island that would bear his name, and to probe the complicated inlets that might prove to be that chimera at the heart of so many European adventures, the Northwest Passage.
After confusing and unproductive dealings with his Spanish counterpart, Vancouver sailed south again, into the long, deep sound he would christen after one of his officers, Lieutenant Peter Puget. In fact, Vancouver played to the hilt the Adamic part of the imperialist, slapping the names of his officers or friends on everything he saw. The white peaks rising to the east and south, for instance, were quickly renamed after Lieutenant Joseph Baker, Lord Samuel Hood, the Baron St. Helen’s, and Rear Admiral Peter Rainier.
1975
Within five years of my visit, the domestic idyll in Portland had disintegrated, and my brother soon married again. Liddy was a native, born in Oregon, raised in Seattle, graced with a kind of irresistible wide-openness and empathy. Animals and children instantly gravitate to her, and so did I. She has an infallible sense of the absurd, an unerring nose for the comic in any moment. She cries and laughs on a dime, often simultaneously. She voices her dogs and cats to memorable effect. Her answer to a long day (or, for that matter, a short one) is “Let’s have a glass of wine.”
Liddy’s buoyancy overwhelmed my solipsism and depressiveness. Where I tended to obsess over a hurt or a failure as if it were a sore tooth, Liddy’s energy was recuperative, forward-moving, light-seeking. She brightened me up and, in a strange way, made me feel saner, as if the world were not entirely fearsome or grim. Her own hurts and losses were mediated by some internal mechanism I seemed to lack. And she liberated me, making me see that rules could be broken, directions ignored.
While my brother practiced law, Liddy and I tore around Portland on random errands, often with her three boys and a large dog in tow and always to the tune of a running, desultory narrative of her family, her friends, her childhood. In her tales of growing up in the Northwest, she often mentioned the islands off the coast of Washington—Whidbey and the more remote San Juans, up near the Canadian border. “You love it so much out here; you’ve got to see those islands,” she’d say. “Someday we’re going. Someday I’m taking you.” Over the next thirty years I would visit many times, but never saw the islands. They floated behind my eyes, out on the water, misty and inscrutable.
1990
Oddly, that describes the place marriage held in my imagination as well: distant, obscure, elusive. Nothing I planned or counted on; another human possibility I regarded as being for others. It was shortly after Liddy’s marriage to my brother collapsed that Bob arrived as a colleague at the college where I worked and became a drinking buddy and sparring partner. Yet when his own marriage ended and suddenly we found ourselves “together,” it never occurred to me that it might be a temporary arrangement. Bob was naturally more cautious than I and only recently single, after all, so he danced around the edges of my intractable certainty for a while. But eventually, there we were, coupled.
We put in eighteen years, sixteen of them at distances of from 700 to 1200 miles, as Bob’s career took him from New England to Colorado while I stayed safely tenured in Michigan. During that time we reconnoitered once in Oregon (mostly so that he could shield me at a particularly treacherous family wedding), where Bob met Liddy, who threw her arms around him. Neither of us saw a good reason to get married in our fifties, with independent incomes, living time zones apart. Long about year eleven we had twin rings designed, agate and white gold, and wore them happily for seven more years as signifiers of our peculiar togetherness.
And togetherness it was. My earlier relationships with men had been mostly transient. Even several time zones away, Bob was with me; I was not alone. I became sharply aware of what being coupled signified to the world, and to me as well, and I paid close attention to the benefits, perceived and real. Hetero coupledom offered safety, social and psychological; I felt I wasn’t facing the slings and arrows alone. It offered sexual validation, especially for a woman: despite the gender upheaval of the past half-century, the single man is still often seen as enviable, free, a person with options; a single woman registers simply as unwanted. And beyond that, it offered belonging—an official ticket to human adulthood. From pricing to seating to travel to holidays to advertising to dinner parties, the world is arranged for couples. Seeing clearly through the entire institution, I nevertheless embraced it with all my might. Bob brought me a warm new foundation of knowing that I was at the center of another person’s life. What I felt, in fact, was saved.
1792
In the spring of 1792, Discovery anchored on the coast of modern British Columbia. Late in May, Vancouver dispatched Lieutenant Joseph Whidbey, also 35, to explore the sound in a small craft that could probe the inlets, in the hope that one of them would prove to open the magic water corridor through the continent.
On June 2nd, sailing the Saratoga Passage along what seemed to be a long peninsula on the western side, Whidbey landed on the southern shore of a deep cove to make some surveys. “Deer playing about in great numbers,” he noted, “rich black soil, grass which grew to three feet in height, ferns nearly twice as high, and an abundance of freshwater streams.” From all directions people flocked to the water’s edge to examine the strangers. He had landed near a large Skagit village; he estimated six hundred residents. This may have been a first encounter with Europeans: Whidbey recorded their fascination with the sailors’ skin; he opened his shirt to demonstrate that his pallor was pervasive.
The Skagit replenished Whidbey’s store with gifts of roasted roots, dried fish, venison, and fresh water, and the crew made to depart. But as it turned out, the point declined into a long sandbar. The outgoing tide had left their ship stranded in mud. With the ready help of the locals, the ship was moved to where the water took it.
True to form, Vancouver later named the deep cove where his lieutenant had anchored after a friend, a grandson of William Penn of Pennsylvania fame.
2008
Maybe, I thought later, our mistake was tempting some obscure power by trying for too much reality. We had dared to construct a life together, really together, in the same place on the map. Bob retired and came back to Michigan, so we made it legal, signed documents, planned a future. We married on New Year’s Eve and took off for the ramshackle cabin we’d bought on the Manistee River in northern Michigan, where we were spending the year.
Four months and eight days later, on a night when spring was making its reticent appearance, Bob somehow fell into the river that ran twenty feet from our door. His body was found around the bend an hour later. I remember little from that hour except my own voice screaming, my own body sliding down the high bank into the water, cold with snowmelt, a neighbor helping me out, my stomach churning with adrenaline. And the tall, awkward, brown-uniformed, buzz-cut young state policemen coming into the cabin, using the word “deceased.”
We had made it legal, signed documents, bought property, planned a future. But the great cosmic clown wasn’t having it: the joke was on me. Bob’s death whipped off the façade and left me to my old sense of destiny. I was not to be allowed not to be alone. From childhood I had known that isolation was my script, that I was in some essential way singular. Now this cataclysm had only reinforced it. A griever is an island.
The world contracted sharply. I reined in my mind lest it wander back to the river and the panic rise again like vomit. I curtailed my movements, too, staying close to home. It was as if there was an electric fence around my mental and physical territory, and for the foreseeable future I would keep inside it. I became insular.
The landscape of time was likewise circumscribed. I couldn’t bear to think back to a world with Bob in it; the details of his body, his habits, our times were torturous to recall. Forward was equally dreadful--a wasteland I had no choice but to walk with nothing to redeem it, nothing waiting. Always before given to regret and worry, now I found myself functioning for the first time in the present moment–by default, as anywhere else was unthinkable. So for two years, as the initial trauma wore off, I occupied the here and the now as much as possible. I didn’t travel. I did my job and came home, dragging grief behind me like a sack of rocks. I tried to turn my new residence in the present to some advantage, and it worked: I found myself more able to be present to my students and others than I had before. Life felt meager and sad and manageable. And time went past me.
1792
Further north, on June 7th, Joseph Whidbey spotted a "very narrow and intricate channel, which. . . abounded with rocks above and beneath the surface of the water." Expecting a dead-end, he carefully navigated the tricky waters as they narrowed between rock walls. And then the channel opened and he saw he was wrong: He had reached the top of a long, thin island. He took this information back to the Discovery, and in return, Vancouver christened the island after his lieutenant. With the pioneer conqueror’s readiness to see the landscape as a willful, untrustworthy opponent, he dubbed the channel Deception Pass.
August, 2010
Approaching Whidbey Island from the north, the road crosses the flat, nondescript terrain around Fidalgo and the Swinomish reservation and then swerves south. Cutting through tall trees, the road suddenly narrows sharply. Without ever having seemed to go uphill, you emerge high above the water. Cars line the roadside and pedestrians wander the sides of the narrow bridge. Far below, indigo waves dazzled by mid-afternoon sun surge through the brief, rocky passage.
So this is Deception Pass. Less dramatic, less romantic than I’d hoped. It deserves a better story than a British imperialist discovering his misprision. What seemed connected turns out to be separate—really a minor deception at best. Until it happens to you, that is. Then the deception blooms darkly outward.
Liddy has designed this trip, the fulfillment of the old promise. In the intervening decades she has married again. Her boys, barely out of diapers when I met them, are grown now, two of them fathers. We have both lost our mothers, and I have lost Bob. More recently I lost my left knee, replaced by titanium and still tender six weeks later. Last spring Liddy called to say she was retiring. “So this is it: we’re going to the islands! Tell me when you can come; I’ll plan everything!” In the days that followed, a remarkable thing happened: I felt myself begin to lean forward.
I left my house at 5:15 this morning, 2:15 a.m. PST. Liddy picked me up in Seattle shortly after noon local time, and we’ve been on the road since then. She has taken the long way, avoiding the ferry to the southern part of the island. So I have been traveling for some fourteen hours. Jet lag is settling in over the basic layer of exhaustion. As we drive down the island, I begin to long for sleep. My knee aches from being in one position for hours.
Whidbey is forty-some miles long, and skinny, at points just a mile across. To the east you look across to Camano Island, the Saratoga passage, and the mainland. To the west you see the Olympic Peninsula and the spectral sierra of the Olympic Mountains. The vista constantly shifts: high bluffs looking out over the water, sweeping gold meadows, deep bays, stands of giant evergreens, towns clustered at water’s edge. About halfway down, Penn’s Cove carves deep into the east side of the island. The cove is famous for mussels; driving around its perimeter you see big wooden mussel rafts floating at the shore. On the cove’s southern shore is Coupeville, where we are to reconnoiter with Liddy’s kindergarten friend, Bobbi. She has tried in vain to find us accommodations until finally, a few days ago, her neighbor agreed to rent us a cottage she owns out at the edge of the cove.
The afternoon turns elastic, stretching on and out of shape. I am struggling to be pleasant to Bobbi and her husband as we run various errands with them, but I feel myself zoning out. When finally we head east out of town at 5:30—8:30 in my body—I’ve entered some kind of fugue state. I feel like I’m dreaming. The edges of my vision blur; the sun is too bright. I can barely follow the conversation. Restaurants are being considered. God, they want to go out to dinner. I can’t imagine doing that.
We turn off onto a side road that immediately dives steeply down into a stand of huge firs, fingering the light. Soon after, another left onto one-lane blacktop with a forbidding PRIVATE ROAD! sign in red. The sign reads “Snakelum Point Road.” Suddenly the cove appears below us, wide and studded with sun-diamonds, and my brain pulls into focus. We’re out of the trees and pointing even more sharply down toward the water. At the bottom of the hill the blacktop curves 90 degrees right to follow the shore, rocky and strewn with big driftlogs. To the right is a wide, wild meadow footing the high bluff we’ve just descended; to the left, along the beach, is a line of cottages, nondescript, boxy, close together. We slow to about 5 mph to pass them. I keep expecting the car to stop or turn, but each driveway is full of cars or kids or dogs. As we pass the last in the row, I see that the road ends at a public beach. I’m confused.
The car stops. Off to the left, out on the very tip of the point by itself, sits a little square house out of another story altogether, a fractured fairy tale. The lower story is covered in dark blue shingles. A squat, dark gray, four-sided pyramid roof comes down low over the first story like a sorcerer’s hat. On all four sides, white-painted dormers look out of the roof like open-lidded eyes. Many windows and doors, trimmed in bright white. Hollyhocks, red, orange, pink, clambering up the walls next to the front door. A dollhouse, a witch’s house. I blink and stare. I might be hallucinating.
Inside, it is silent, bright, warm. The peace is palpable. The main room, occupying the left side of the house, centers on a tall, shiny stone fireplace. Next to it is a reproduction of an old photograph of a Native man and woman, reading “Charlie Snakelum & wife.” Through the windows the waters of the Cove roll, only a few yards away, below a bulkhead of rocks and standing logs. There is no beach at this point; the tide is in and seems almost to engulf the house. The kitchen, lined with windows including two original ship’s portholes, feels like the prow of a vessel breasting the waves. From the great room, French doors open to a flagstone terrace. In a daze, I go out. Across the Saratoga Passage of Puget Sound, Mt. Baker raises its head over a wreath of clouds, reflecting the western light. The White Sentinel, as both the Lummi and Skagit people called it. Sailboats, far out. Gulls crying, diving.
I began this day in one world and will end it in another. My sense of unreality, fed by weariness, flows happily into transport.
It is dark when Liddy and I return from dinner. She will sleep upstairs under the eaves; my knee earns me the downstairs bedroom. A queen bed covered in white nearly fills it. Beyond the bed are French doors opening to a patch of flagstones, then perhaps ten feet of grass to the breakfront. The view is straight east, to Camano Island. One of the doors, swollen, won’t shut entirely. When I decide I won’t worry about that, I feel something open in me as well. I crawl like a refugee onto the bed. I am awake just long enough to take in the lights on Camano, the slight breeze through the open door, the sound of the waves against the breakwater.
1792
It’s hard not to watch Whidbey sailing away without imagining the locals waving and calling from the shore. In short, a prelapsarian moment. Europe lands in Native America and takes nothing—yet—but food, and small gifts, help and data. Native America examines European skin with interest and probably humor, but not fear or worry—yet. Europe sails away, writes in its journal, reports to the boss. Who reports to his. Maps are made, imprinted with the names of Vancouver’s associates.
Among the curious, generous people on shore as Whidbey sailed out into the Passage, there may well have been a child or youth called Snetlum, who would grow to lead his people. Three years after his death in 1852, two of his sons were among the many signatories of the Treaty of Point Elliott, which began removing the local tribes to reservations to make way for U. S. expansion. The point at the mouth of Penn’s Cove remained an important gathering place for the Skagit, imprinted with Snetlum’s name, evolved to Snakelum. His grandson, known locally as Charlie Snakelum, is buried there. It was, perhaps. a holy place.
Morning
Still on Eastern Time, I wake very early. An orange ball of a sun is rising over Camano into the pale sky. I get up, push the open door wide, and walk barefoot out onto the flagstones.
The tide is far out, exposing the long tip of the point, hundreds of yards of muddy sand covered with shells and weeds. Shorebirds dive and strut, confabulating over stranded mussels and clams. The sun’s heat is just a whispered promise through the cool air. The water is silky in places, in others rippled with breezes and complex currents as it breaks around the point. The sun casts a diamond path across the waves. Far out, a ragged wooden elbow rises from the low water, strange relic of a mast, maybe, or a long-gone wharf, now a marker of dangerously shallow water. Farther, a green buoy rocks where Penn’s Cove meets the Passage. In the distance, the ridges of the White Sentinel, in shining isolation above it all, lightly ringed in cloud.
Something on the point punctuates the water: a lone blue heron, on one leg, motionless. Like a dark brushstroke against the morning, more gesture than creature. When it moves, it is with slow, tai-chi grace, one foot down, the other leg bent and drawn up above the water toward its breast, then carefully extended to plant the other foot. Suddenly it strikes like a snake at something in the surf, long neck extending sharply, then whipping back up, tossing the victim down its long gullet. Then stillness again, containment, as if it were there in its splendid isolation mostly to watch the morning break. The quintessence of poise.
Cove and sound, mountain and treeline, sky and sun, converge in the bird, wheeling around it. It is the morning’s centerpoint, the pivot of the universe. A phrase of T. S. Eliot’s slips into my mind--“The still point of the turning world.”
. . . at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I feel the present, in which I have cowered for two heavy years, expand to dimensions beyond time. And yet the present is all there is, this stunned moment.
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. [i]
To get to this point has cost me everything.
The heron has moved up the strand. Herons nest in pairs but generally fish alone; this is a solo fisher, its solitude essential to its business and beauty. It stands for its long spells at the shifting juncture of sea and land as if it were entirely alone in the landscape, while connected to everything, occupying its place as a perfect single note occupies the air.
Eventually, the day begins to move.
Always / Now
In its course, I root out the owner of the cottage and write a check for a full month of next summer. It is not until the islands are behind me and I am back home that I recognize I have bought into the future—a small, rarified chunk of it, but futurity it is. I have pledged that I will leave home again, and that I will look and live forward. I’ve put money on it, money I’m privileged to have. Through the dark Midwestern winter, I will carry in mind a tall, singular bird at the center of a morning.
I don’t know that the heron my mother saw meant anything to her beyond the small thrill of seeing unusual wildlife in the suburbs. Its loneness may well have spoken to her. She may have carried it in her imagination, hoping to spot it again every time she drove down 14-Mile, but it’s equally likely she forgot it. It lodged in my memory, drawing meaning as my mother’s life became clearer to me. It came to represent something singular in her, in every sense of that word, something apart from her circumstances. She was widowed twice, married three times, insisting that she was “a man’s woman.” But I always think of her as distinct and separate and full of grace. What she wanted most for me was to be able to stand on my own in whatever winds blew through my life. So I try for that. I rummage through the jumble of myself for something like a bird balanced on the edge of time, patient as the sun, waiting for the approach of what it seeks.
[i] All Eliot quotations in this essay come from “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets.
Gail Griffin is the author of four books of nonfiction. "Singular Bird: A Discovery Log," which appears in these pages, is included in her new book, "Grief's Country: A Memoir in Pieces," from Wayne State University Press. Her essays, brief nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Southern Review, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Fourth Genre, and Solstice, among other venues. She lives and writes in southwestern Michigan.